Kransdorf

Although the words “anorexia nervosa” typically conjure up images of emaciated bodies, eating disorders characterized by dietary restriction or weight loss can — and do — occur at any weight. However, precisely because anorexia nervosa is associated with underweight, doctors are less likely to identify eating disorders among individuals who are in the so-called “normal” or above normal weight range, even if they have all the other symptoms of anorexia nervosa.

Clearly, this is a problem.

For one, there is no evidence that eating disorder not otherwise specified (EDNOS) — a diagnosis given to individuals who do not fulfill all of the criteria for anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa — is less severe or less dangerous than full syndrome anorexia nervosa. As I’ve blogged about, individuals with EDNOS have comparable mortality rates (see: EDNOS, Bulimia Nervosa, as Deadly as Anorexia Nervosa in Outpatients) and similar (sometimes even more severe) … Continue reading →

Definitioner

published by the American Psychiatric Association, offers a common language and standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders (11)

DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)

published by the American Psychiatric Association, offers a common language and standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders (11)

median

the value of the observation that comes half way when the observations are ranked in order (2)

prevalence

the proportion of a population having a particular condition or characteristic (e.g., the percentage of people in a city with a particular disease, or who smoke) (2)

indicator

data that indicates or identifies a variable (e.g., if our variable is children’s attitudes to reading, changing patterns of reading among a group of children might be an indicator of that) (7)

accuracy

refers to the way in which we describe the attribute in which we are interested; for our measurement to be accurate, there must be a constant mathematical relationship between our measurement and the true value (7)

mortality

death (2)

questionnaire

a set of predetermined questions for all respondents that serves as the primary research instrument in survey research (6)

recall bias

a bias arising from mistakes in recollecting events, both because of failures of memory, and looking at things 'with hindsight' and possibly changed views; people's reports of what is happening to them currently, therefore, can be more accurate than their recall of what happened two years ago and how they felt about it at the time; this bias is a threat to the validity of retrospective studies (2)

bias

in statistics, a systematic error or deviation in results or inferences from the truth; in studies of the effects of health care, the main types of bias arise from systematic differences in the groups that are compared (selection bias), the care that is provided, exposure to other factors apart from the intervention of interest (performance bias), withdrawals or exclusions of people entered into a study (attrition bias) or how outcomes are assessed (detection bias); reviews of studies may also be particularly affected by reporting bias, where a biased subset of all the relevant data is available (2)

self-report (self-report data)

information that people being surveyed give about themselves (5)

bradycardia

excessive slowness in the action of the heart, usually with a heart rate below 60 beats per minute (3)